P2P

Peer-to-peer file sharing has been around since the beginning of the internet. Literally millions of  people have been doing this for years. Some share files with their friends innocently, while others purposely leak information out to the whole world. This P2P file sharing has been an issue that has been crippling the music industry and has required to the industry to completely change how it's run. As we know the music industry used to rely on physical album sales for revenue but thanks to the internet all of that has changed. P2P file sharing software including LimeWire and FrostWire allowed for people to post up any files they wished to upload onto a database that allowed anyone from the world to access and download the files. This cause a problem in the music industry because as soon as an album would be released to the public, you would see hundreds if not, thousands of files being shared among the public which of course lead to a huge loss in revenue. Major record labels are actually dying out which is why we see a new age in the music industry. Welcome to the age of streaming services! Which were created specifically to combat piracy and P2P file sharing. It allows for customers to have access to literally any song they want for a small monthly fee.

Privacy

With the internet, information is so openly shared especially with social media. People share so much about their lives than ever before. From pictures, to videos, to even live streams. There are even people who get paid by streaming services to share their every day lives with their subscribers. Social media I feel is as private as you want it to be. You can create your own image on social media. There are even people pretending to be other people through social media. If however, choose to be selective in what you post then it is possible to be private and still use new media services. But even other applications such as UBER request bank information in order to use their service. It seems as though we are almost tied to our technology.

Advice

If I was hired by Brooklyn College to use New Media to improve the college experience the first thing I would do is allow for blackboard to be integrated with social media a little bit more. If there are other students like myself, they tend to forget to check their blackboard notifications as often as they should. I would also make it easier to find out about events by creating a page on every social media possible and have all of the clubs on campus submit their upcoming events and parties so that students have a more centralized place to find out about things. When I talk to new students at Brooklyn College they often say that they feel lost at the school and that there is a lack of community if you aren't involved in greek life or a club. I would want to change that and make the campus feel a little more like high school used to feel and I think that social media would be the perfect way to do so.

Creativity and New Media

New Media allows people to do whatever they want and be whatever they want. Many people have completely different personas on social media than they have in real life. Some people are comedians, others are musicians, others display art and photography on their pages, some sell clothes. The possibilities are endless! Me personally I make music and model. I use social media to connect with thousands of people and even got opportunities to work with companies including Fresh Empire which is an anti smoking campaign that has ads all over the internet and even tv stations such as MTV and VH1! This is one of the shots we took.




                                      

Creativity

New Media has really shown how creative people can be. A great example of this would be "memes." For those who are not familiar with the term, memes are basically pictures from movies, viral videos, tv shows, or even drawings with captions that relate to many different people. The creative part comes in where there are a variety of different versions of memes for one picture. Some memes have hundreds of different versions of the same picture and can get very creative because they require a lot of thought and wit to come up with seeing as that certain pictures are only trending for a couple of weeks, so you have to come up with one quickly for a trending picture before nobody cares about it anymore.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality allows for people to live whatever life they wish they could have through a digital world in which they can communicate and interact with other people who want to do the same thing. VR is good because it allows for people to be creative in a space where they won't be judged by their peers in real life. This gives them complete freedom to do whatever they want without the fear of any consequences. However, people can start to lose grip of reality and think that they have as much freedom to do whatever they want in the real world like they do in the virtual world. Some people may even spend more time in the virtual world than they do in the real world.

Refrences:

1. Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content by Eytan Bakshy, Brian Karrer, and Lada A. Adamic. Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, July 6-10, Stanford, CA. Available at: http://www.personal.umich.edu/~ladamic/papers/SecondLife/SocialInfluenceEC.pdf

2. "In Room 100, It's Sid and Nancy All Over Again,"by Saki Knafo, The New York Times, May 3, 2009, p. CY6. Available at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/nyregion/thecity/03virt.html

Twitter

Twitter discussions are quicker and easier to have than a blackboard discussion. The app itself is just more accessible and easier to use on any device. Often people use their twitter account more often than their blackboard account anyway. However, an in class discussion would probably be the most efficient and intimate way to have a discussion if all of the students in the class are comfortable speaking with one another. Sometimes you find that people are more comfortable voicing their opinion about certain topics through a computer screen rather than face to face.